Lightning is a spectacular weather phenomenon occurring in the atmosphere, which is accompanied by transient, high current, high voltage and strong electromagnetic radiation. Lightning often leads to big disasters, resulting in not only loss of life and personal injury, but also severe economic loss in the industries of aeronautics and astronautics, national defense, power, communication, electronics, petrochemistry, transportation, forestry, etc. With rapid development of social economy, improvement of modernization level and wide application of information technology in our life, the damage extent, economic loss, and social influence caused by lightning become much greater.
Real-time lightning location data is an important basis for lightning forecasting and warning. The warning of the areas where lightning is going to take place can help us take precaution measures and reduce the damages that may be caused by lightning. In addition, lightning location data is also an important basis for disaster investigation. Detection efficiency and location accuracy of the lightning location system play a key role in effect of lightning warning, evaluation of lightning warning result and investigation of lightning disaster.
At present, many countries and regions in the world have set up cloud-to-ground lightning location networks and several total lightning location systems are also installed for monitoring lightning in real time. Some systems can even detect the development of lightning channel. However, there are so far no apparatuses that can automatically and simultaneously obtain digital images of lightning channel in total-sky range and information on the time of lightning occurrence, lightning type (cloud or cloud-to-ground lightning), and polarity of cloud-to-ground lightning in the image. Nor are there suitable apparatuses capable of observing and accumulating abundant data to thoroughly evaluate the detection efficiency and location accuracy of the prior art lightning location systems.